The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (15 page)

Since my carry-on must do the heavy lifting, I have been forced to employ strategies that can be more than a little embarrassing. Summer or winter, you will see me in my heaviest clothes, waddling up to the security gate in something like, say, a Dries Van Noten smock over two skirts and a vintage petticoat, in an attempt to smuggle a few more garments onto the plane. This explosion of fabric inevitably results in my being forced to submit to a series of humiliating and invasive security-related procedures, since, let’s face it, there could be an entire arsenal stashed under my ensemble.

Can there be a less elegant way to begin a journey than planting your Fogal-clad feet on two filthy yellow rubber footprints, waiting for a total stranger to stick her hands up your dress and dust you down with a powdery substance? No matter! I just smile when the words “Female alert!” ring out from the TSA agent at the x-ray machine as I approach. To forestall this body search, I have been known to visit the ladies’ room, peel off a few layers of clothing, stuff them into the largest conveyance that could possibly pass as a piece of “hand luggage,” and hope that this now-diminished costume will get me waved through. Alas, this only works half the time. “Thank you for keeping us safe!” I cry when the guard realizes there is nothing under my dress—except maybe another dress.

At least now I am rushing to the ladies’ pain-free. For years I insisted on toting a battered Louis Vuitton duffel, convinced that this bag made me look like Sara Murphy circa 1920, heading off to the Riviera, even when I nearly dislocated my shoulder carrying it. So I moved on to what seems in retrospect to be an insane solution, though it made perfect sense to me at the time—I bought the duffel its own collapsible metal cart, secured it under a crosshatch of bungee cords, and dragged the whole monstrosity through the airport. Of course, I had to collapse the contraption at the door of the plane and tug both it and the 100-pound duffel down the aisle, rolling over people’s toes as I fought my way to the depths of coach.

“Get wheels!” my mom pleaded for years. “Look how cute the flight attendants look with their little rolling suitcases!” But every time I considered this solution, I heard the words of a stylish photographer friend echoing in my brain. “You can’t have wheels,” he said in a low, disgusted whisper. “It’s a terrible gesture when you are pulling it!” Terrible gesture or not, I did eventually concede, and the result has been life-changing. I am now the poster child for the rabid cult of Rimowa, an ingenious brand that relies on some kind of advanced technology (or maybe just four wheels?) that enables me to glide through the airport as if I am walking a shiny, cherry-red greyhound. And it’s not just the ease of motion—these things also have flat tops where you can stack expandable Longchamp totes (another remarkable baggage innovation) that allow you to transport all those fashion items you found so irresistible when you tried them on in foreign fitting rooms and now will never wear again. But that’s another story.

If I had more time, I could travel by boat, which would solve my problem. You can bring an almost endless number of cases onboard, making you look like you just stepped out of a Fred Astaire movie as you fidget on the buffet line. In fact, Cunard offers a White Star shipping service that will fly your luggage from home to the ship—as many pieces as you like!—so long as they will fit in your stateroom. Appealing as this notion may be, it is alas of limited usefulness: I usually have to be somewhere in eight hours, not eight days. And anyway, wouldn’t I be consumed with worry that my cases, torn from my hands and flying on their own to some distant dock, would lose their way?

Annoyed friends and colleagues, stuck waiting for me on the other side of security, have gently suggested I modify my personal style just a little. But despite the inconvenience, I stick to my guns (perhaps not the most felicitous turn of phrase when it comes to air travel). And just when I think I am the only lonely pilgrim dolled up in layers of tulle while my fellow travelers cavort happily in Juicy Couture, another underappreciated, overdressed stalwart will sail into view. En route to the Life Ball, in Vienna, one year, I spied the fabulously louche New York nightlife legend Amanda Lepore, poured into a curvaceous satin frock and teetering on vertiginous stilettos while twirling an enormous hatbox. And what a delightful sight she was! Though she was channeling Jayne Mansfield and my costume was closer to Minnie Mouse, we shared a complicit glance—sisters under the skin. If you listened closely over the din of the loudspeakers, you could almost hear the spirit of Mrs. Cardeza, resplendent in a lace-trimmed tea gown, cheering us on.

PETER JON LINDBERG

FROM
Travel + Leisure

T
HE PIPER CUB
buzzes back into view, flying just 200 feet over the waves, its red-lettered banner unfurled behind. All afternoon it’s been crisscrossing the cloudless sky. Every day, the same plane, same offer:
KEN’S MAINE CLAMBAKE—$19.95
. When I first started coming here, the price was $8.99. Back then I could read it without my glasses.

Each time the plane passes, the kids on the beach look up from their pails and shovels and cheer. (Today, our friends’ son Silas is building a sand replica of Fenway Park.) Soon there will be Popsicles, a game of foursquare. And later, as the tide comes in, we’ll round up our blankets and shuffle over the dunes to the house, to start the evening ritual: fixing Maine Route 1 cocktails, shucking corn, steaming lobsters, plucking basil from the window box, making sea-urchin pasta. After dinner we’ll have a round of Bananagrams while the Sox game plays on AM radio. If it’s chilly there might be a fire—though we’re as likely to doze off before 10, sun-drenched and surf-pummeled as we are. In the morning the gurgle of coffee will coax us from bed at dawn, and the whole routine will begin again.

I’m not sure how it started, and I can’t say when it might end, but we’ve been making this trip together for more than a decade, my wife, Nilou, and I and this group of friends. It’s become, unexpectedly yet unchangingly, What We Do. Every August, we stuff our cars with iceboxes and inflatable rafts, sharp knives and good wine, and point our caravan northward for the annual migration to Pine Point.

There may be prettier beaches, with quainter towns beyond, some on this very Maine coast. Yet this is the one I daydream about, through drizzly Aprils and slate-gray Decembers. I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen this place, given my pick of a thousand others, but years ago this place chose me, and it’s lured me back every summer since, so I guess it’s settled. We’re together for the foreseeable future.

My friend Mark and I have known Pine Point since we were teenagers; his parents, the McAdams, own a summer cottage just upshore from our rental. It was my idea to bring the group. Until their first visit in 2001, Nilou and the rest had never been north of Boston—couldn’t crack a lobster, couldn’t name a single Red Sox. In the years since they’ve become localized, loyalized: converts to the cult of Maine.

Constancy is the most underrated of virtues, in people but also in places. You can revisit London or Tokyo every six months and find an entirely new city in place of the one you remembered, such that even your 18th trip feels like a first date. Returning to Pine Point, we find everything as we left it—as if we’d merely stepped out for a Dr Pepper in the middle of a game of paddleball, then returned, 358 days later, to resume it.

Set on a peninsula south of Portland, Pine Point is a cluster of rustic cottages and slightly grander Victorians set along a series of cul-de-sacs jutting off the main road toward the sea. At the end of each cul-de-sac is a sandy footpath that cuts through a deep ribbon of dune grass that hums with dragonflies and ripples in the breeze. And at the end of the path, where the tallgrass falls away, lies a seven-mile crescent of flat, smooth, sand-colored sand.

Our first walk of the season down that path—a barefoot trudge weighed down by sloshing coolers and salt-scarred beach chairs—may be the happiest moment of my year. That it requires a bit of effort and patience only adds to the drama. The tallgrass feels like some magical green barrier that must be breached, while the slight incline of the dune means you can hear and smell the ocean before you actually see it.

The house we rent isn’t much to look at from the outside, and entirely too much to look at on the inside, what with the owners’ ever-expanding collection of beach kitsch. But it’s our place, and through the years that’s come to mean a lot. Were I a first-time renter arriving today, I might take issue with the abundance of crab figurines, the rather lumpy beds, the rusty taps and hinges on the outdoor shower. But the shower itself? No marble-clad bathroom could compete.

Our routine is quite simple: Swim. Nap. Eat. Rinse. Repeat. The start of the week is customarily filled with discussions of all the activities we might finally get to this year: a sailboat charter in Kennebunkport; a hike up Mount Agamenticus; perhaps a jaunt up to Rockland—but really, who are we kidding? We’re not going to do any of it. And when the end of the week comes, we won’t regret a thing.

Instead we find more modest diversions. Long beach-blanket grocery lists are made, elaborate meal plans hatched. There is the occasional detour to Portland’s Standard Baking Co. for their unspeakably good brioche. At some point we’ll paddle kayaks into the nearby Scarborough Marsh, slipping through reed-walled channels while herons and ibis eye us from the banks. And should we ever tire of the quiet—or crave penny candy—we can always ride down shore to Old Orchard Beach.

On summer weekends, when 100,000 revelers descend on the place, Old Orchard officially becomes the largest community in Maine. It is also, semiofficially, the tackiest place in all of New England: a honky-tonk playground of flip-flop shops, fried-dough stands, temporary-tattoo parlors, and carnival rides that makes Ocean City, Maryland, look like the Henley Royal Regatta. Needless to say, we love it. The Grand Trunk Railroad used to run here direct from Montreal, and Old Orchard remains catnip for vacationing Québecois. The fried-dough stands also sell
poutine;
signs at the amusement park are in English and French. This provides a semblance of cultural displacement: batting cages become
cages des frappeurs;
Jet Skis become
scooters des mers;
while Skee-Ball becomes, charmingly,
le skee-ball
.

As a younger man I was flummoxed by people who returned to the same place every year. What were they afraid of? Didn’t they know there was more to see? Travel, I insisted, was about the unfamiliar, the undiscovered, the passport full of stamps. I still believe that last part, if less adamantly now. What I’ve awoken to since is the soul-affirming joy of returning. Going back, it turns out, does not mean retreat. A ritual is not a rut.

I’ve also learned the difference between
traveling
and
vacationing
, two words that are often used interchangeably but mean different things. A vacation typically involves travel, but travel is not always a vacation. Sometimes it’s quite the opposite—fraught with uncertainty over where to go, where to stay, what to see. Vacations are a respite from all that. For us, Maine is sweet relief.

Over time, and through the McAdams, we’ve come to know our neighbors. Each morning the residents of Pine Point gather on the otherwise empty beach, with their dogs and their coffee mugs, to discuss last night’s humidity or Ellsbury’s stand-up triple. Although we’re still technically “from away”—I suppose you could call us one fifty-second local—they welcome us into their klatches, in part because we, too, are holding ceramic coffee mugs. We’ve also become enthusiastic patrons of the neighbors’ kids’ lemonade stand, a smart little dune-side palapa that they’ve festooned with homemade thatch. And we are on a first-name basis—we don’t know their last names—with the staff at Bayley’s Lobster Pound, where we have a standing order each evening for a half dozen females.

Now and then we’ll spot the shambling figure we call the Clam Man, a grumbly chap with a spongy beard, leering fish eyes, a coral-like complexion, and the bearing of an insane Poseidon. He appears only at low tide, loping down the beach with a bucketful of just-harvested surf clams, their long oily tongues protruding from shells the size of Nerf footballs. The local children watch him from a distance. I spoke to him once—he answered in French, then grumbled off down the beach.

And so it goes, the same characters making their exits and entrances, the scenery and plotline seldom changing. Nilou once likened our Maine trips to rereading a favorite novel: she already knows how it will end, but getting there is still as satisfying, if not more so, since she’s always picking up new shades and nuances along the way. (The Clam Man is Québecois!) And, as with a cherished book, there’s no risk of disappointment—unless it rains all week, which some years it has. In that case we play a lot more Bananagrams.

Of course, things do change in Pine Point. Against a familiar backdrop one notices all sorts of quotidian adjustments, like when the snack bar gets a new sign, or the pier is painted a slightly deeper green, or coconut water makes its debut at the local grocery. These subtle shifts of the light keep us on our sandy toes, while reminding us how lucky we are to have found a place that’s stayed, in most respects, pretty much the same. Our friend Michael put it best last summer: “There are few things you can rely on in this world, and thank God Maine is one of them.” Every visit is a sort of homecoming.

Anyway. I’m off to pack the cooler. Maybe I’ll see you on the beach.

BERND BRUNNER

FROM
The Smart Set

N
O, YOU’D RATHER
not cuddle with them. They seem a little too unpredictable and unkempt for that. And it’s not tempting to project human characteristics on them either. But it is easy to feel sorry for some of them, who bear traces of injuries, disease, and accidents. Most resemble one another: large, with a light brown, sometimes darker coat. Some have short legs paired with unusually large bodies. Despite their scars, the wild dogs of Istanbul seem self-sufficient and untroubled, as if no one could mean them any harm. You can find them everywhere: between parked cars or, early in the morning, under the chairs in front of the Starbucks on Taksim Square. Often they just lie there and doze. Are they recovering from last night’s activities? Most people don’t seem bothered by them, but it’s obvious that some, a little uncertain, take pains to avoid them. But they are not to be made fun of because of that.